Make Bradford British - TV review

Right, time for a quiz. Is European law legally binding in the UK?

Question 2: Which two part time jobs are most common for children? Don't know? Right, it's off to culture college with you. You're to be seconded into the Bradford School of Cultural Mismatch Studies.

You'll be taking classes in how to completely offend everybody in the room with one seriously misjudged anecdote, and a course in the philosophy of Britishness.

Make Bradford British is a two-part programme studying the difficulties of cultural integration in the Yorkshire city.

In it, eight people from different backgrounds around Bradford live together to try to better understand one another's cultures.

Naturally there are a few tears, tantrums, and moments of reflection, and the eight participants are regularly asked to reflect on what they understand by Britishness, and where they place themselves in modern Bradford.

Where the programme succeeds is where it shows how people, forced together, can come to understand one another, to integrate and to empathise with other people's backgrounds.

A couple of the people taking part do find their opinions changing over the course of the days they spend together. Some are shocked by the racist language they once found routine, others find their preconceptions about other cultures challenged.

There's some fairly shocking language used in the programme, and some frankly abhorrent views – one man, clutching a pint of flat-looking lager, mutters: "Just because a dog's born in a stable, it doesn't make it a horse."

That view is endorsed by one of the participants, Damon, who by the end of the show has quietly absorbed the views of his fellow housemates, embracing his new friends.

But it's far from perfect as a programme. Our two 'cultural integration experts' sneer at the academic studies into the same subject, promising to find out what the man on the street wants.

They never explain what makes them experts, or how what they are doing will be applied to society at large.

Make Bradford British is more an examination of a handful of people's own view of their own experience of being British, and it's certainly a valid subject to address while cultures are struggling to integrate in parts of the UK.

You see how attitudes collide, and it's interesting to see how that can be broken down.

But at the same time, for a topic that is of such importance to modern Britain, it all seems unnecessarily gimmicky.

An altogether more traditional sort of documentary appeared beforehand on BBC4.

Dallas Campbell took us through the history of the dog on Woof! A Horizon Guide To Dogs.

I've maintained for some time that a channel exclusively dedicated to dogs mucking about would be a far more valid use of the airwaves than some other channels I could name (I'm looking at you here, ITV2).

But until that day comes, we'll have to make do with interesting, insightful programmes like this.

It looked over different aspects of the history of dogs' relationship with man through archive footage from old episodes of the BBC's Horizon programme.

It never relied on putting a load of different dogs in a house together, and none of them were even faintly judgmental.

That said, some of the characters featured were barking.

Thom Kennedy